Toward action comprehension for searching: Mining actionable intents in query entities

Understanding search engine users' intents has been a popular study in information retrieval, which directly affects the quality of retrieved information. One of the fundamental problems in this field is to find a connection between the entity in a query and the potential intents of the users, the latter of which would further reveal important information for facilitating the users' future actions. In this article, we present a novel research method for mining the actionable intents for search users, by generating a ranked list of the potentially most informative actions based on a massive pool of action samples. We compare different search strategies and their combinations for retrieving the action pool and develop three criteria for measuring the informativeness of the selected action samples, that is, the significance of an action sample within the pool, the representativeness of an action sample for the other candidate samples, and the diverseness of an action sample with respect to the selected actions. Our experiment, based on the Action Mining (AM) query entity data set from the Actionable Knowledge Graph (AKG) task at NTCIR‐13, suggests that the proposed approach is effective in generating an informative and early‐satisfying ranking of potential actions for search users.